Liam Young, 13 12 17

Applications are now open for places and scholarships in our Fiction and Entertainment Masters Program at Sci Arc in Los Angeles. Students work with world-renowned professionals in the worlds of film, fiction, animation, marketing, games, and documentary making to build new forms of creative practice. Check the website for details and the line up of partners and collaborators drawn from companies such as Framestore, the Sundance Institute, Disney Imagineering, Vice Media, Netflix, Digital Domain, and Imaginary Forces.

Program Description- What we think the world looks like is largely determined by fiction and entertainment—extraordinary shared languages through which we exchange ideas and engage with our environment. It is impossible to underestimate the importance of media in the production of culture. Given the critical role contemporary media plays in our lives, it is urgent to widen the scope of architecture beyond just buildings alone. Why shouldn’t architects design the next Hollywood blockbuster? Virtual reality environments? Viral videos? Political campaigns? In SCI-Arc Edge’s Fiction and Entertainment program, we engage the techniques of popular culture to imagine and visualise alternative worlds. Deeply embedded in the entertainment industry of Los Angeles, this program is a place to start telling new kinds of stories about the emerging conditions of the twenty-first century.

Liam Young, 08 11 17

Liam Young is curating Fear and Wonder: An Expedition Through the landscapes of Fiction at Sci Arc in Los Angeles on Nov 11th 3pm – 9pm. Our perception of the world is largely shaped through the mediums of fiction. Our political positions are informed by fake news, we live out our lives in the pixelated territories of video games and we escape into the pages of a novel or the flicker of the movie screen. In film, games and literature we have always imagined alternative worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways. In Fear and Wonder we join an ensemble of directors, concept artists, video game designers and storytellers for an expedition through an atlas of imaginary worlds, fictional cities and speculative geographies. Curated by Liam Young / Fiction and Entertainment Postgraduate Masters

Starring:

Hannah Beachler, Production Designer (Moonlight, Beyonce’s Lemonade)

Hannah Beachler is the award winning production designer of Moonlight, Beyonce’s Lemonade, Creed and the upcoming Marvel film Black Panther.

Lauren Beukes, Author (Broken Monsters, Zoo City)

South African based Lauren Beukes is a best-selling novelist and author of comics, screenplays and television. Recent books include Broken Monsters, Zoo City, Shining Girls and Moxyland.

Rick Carter, Production Designer (Star Wars: The Force Awakens)

Rick Carter is a multiple academy award winning production designer who has created the worlds of some of the most seminal films of recent times. Projects include Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avatar, Lincoln and Back to the Future.

Mike Mignola, Comics Artist (Hellboy)

Mike Mignola is a comic artist and writer known for creating the Mignola-verse with Dark Horse comics, a collection of titles including Hellboy and B.P.R.D. He has also created similarly themed titles including Baltimore, The Amazing Screw-On Head and Joe Golem, Occult Detective.

Alex McDowell is a designer and world-builder working across feature films, and immersive storytelling projects for major industries and institutions. He was the production designer for such films as Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Man of Steel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Minority Report and now directs the USC World Building Media Lab in Los Angeles.

Victor Martinez, Concept Artist (Blade Runner 2049)

Victor Martinez is an artist who works on concept design and world building for the entertainment industry. Victor has designed for films such as Blade Runner 2049, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek Beyond, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Batman vs Superman.

Ane Crabtree, Costume Designer (Handmaid’s Tale)

Ane Crabtree is a costume designer for film and television. Ane has developed the costumes for the recent television series’ The Handmaid’s Tale and Westworld. Her clothes reflect the political power structures at play in the worlds she is designing for.

Jimmi Simpson, Actor (Westworld)

Jimmi Simpson is an actor who most recently played William, a key character in HBO’s hit series Westworld. Jimmi is also known for his role in the Netflix political drama series House of Cards.

David O’Reilly, Games Designer (Everything)

David O’Reilly is an independent games designer, animator and film maker. David has developed animated sequences for films such as Her, and has recently launched Everything, a reality simulator game featuring thousands of playable characters from the spanning from the scale of the universe to a bacterium.

Patti Podesta, Production Designer (American Gods)

Patti Podesta is a Production Designer for film and television. She is known for her spare, moody design for the critically acclaimed film Memento directed by Chris Nolan and recently she has been designing the television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Nivanh Chanthara, Concept Artist (Ghost in The Shell, Babiru)

Nivanh Chanthara is concept artist who has been designing characters, environments and props for the Deus Ex franchise. Nivanh also designs for comics and the film and television industry and has recently developed art for the new Ghost in the Shelland his ongoing personal dystopian city project, Babiru.

David Delgado is a visual strategist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he creates experiences to bring audiences closer to emerging technologies and prompts them to emotionally engage with contemporary scientific research.

Angela Washko Games Artist (World of Warcraft)

Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. Angela has been intervening in various online game worlds, seeding within them such projects as The Councilon Gender Sensitivity and Behavioural Awareness which is based in the World of Warcraft.

Mike Mignola is a comic artist and writer known for creating the Mignola-verse with Dark Horse comics, a collection of titles including Hellboy and B.P.R.D. He has also created similarly themed titles including Baltimore, The Amazing Screw-On Head and Joe Golem, Occult Detective. Geoff Manaugh is the creator of BLDGBLOG and author of A Burgular’s Guide to the City.

DJ Molly Shaman, Soundtracks

DJ Molly Shaman is resident at the Melody Lounge and the Lava Lounge in LA. She will be mixing the soundscape for the event from a collection of iconic film scores.

Liam Young, 26 03 17

The Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery presents Liam Young: New Romance, the first U.S. solo exhibition of speculative architect, artist, and filmmaker Liam Young. The exhibition features three recently completed film projects – In the Robot Skies (2016), Where the City Can’t See (2016), and the debut of Renderlands (2017) – as well as a selection of props, materials and research that helped shape the fictional worlds encompassed in each film.

While storytelling, documentary film and multimedia performance have been central to Young’s practice, the exhibition reveals his emerging engagement with narrative film as an architectural medium and his ground-breaking experimentation with new technologies as cinematic tools. Young deploys autonomous drones (In the Robot Skies), manipulates laser scanning and data (Where the City Can’t See), and mines the digital detritus of the global industry of outsourced renderings (Renderlands) to create new worlds where fictions unfold. Harnessing technologies of visualization and narrative to craft urban imaginaries, the trio of films expand our understanding of how architectural design can uncover possible futures.

Liam Young, 15 10 15

As a part of the Human+, The Future of Our Species exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona Liam Young has developed another panorama and set of models for the ongoing project New City. You can see the new project at Human+ from 7 October 2015 – 10 April 2016 . New City is an ongoing series of animated skylines of the near future. In intricate detail they depict a speculative urbanism or exaggerated present, that is a projection of the environmental, political and cultural consequences of new technologies. Photographs taken on expeditions around the world documenting these emerging phenomena have been meticulously stitched together and reimagined to form each future city skyline. In this way ‘New City’ slips between the documentary and the visionary, where current trends are satirized and extrapolated to provoke a discussion about the impact technology has on our world. Machines of Post Human Production is the latest panorama from New City and depicts scenes from along the planetary scaled conveyor belt and endless factory floor of technology manufacture. Along this global infrastructure the body has been repurposed as a machine, just one more component of a production line which connects the cities of consumption to the online shopping distribution centre, the autonomous container ships of maritime trade, the rows of choreographed factory robots and the super scaled mining equipment that roam the earth. Driven by efficiency algorithms, watching over us through programmed machine vision these are the creatures of the post Anthropocene, the mechanisms that now produce our world.

Liam Young, 24 03 15

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine, are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives.

We are inviting you to join us for our Summer expedition, to work alongside international collaborators from the worlds of film, science, technology and fiction and travel through the Lithium Fields of Bolivia and the Atacama Desert. The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals.

For our Summer Expedition 2015 we map a landscape spectrum spanning rain soaked forests to parched flat earth as we blaze a trail from the Bolivian Amazon to the Atacama Desert. In the heart of Bolivia, we will bear witness to a site, which epitomizes a burgeoning new era of electric fuel. We chase the grey rush to Salar de Uyuni, where under ethereal inverted skies lies over half of the world’s reserves of Lithium. Buried here, beneath the mirror of the world’s largest salt flat, is a grey gold – a substance in every one of our pockets, in every gleaming device, and every electric car. Where a gear-shift in human technological development has rendered this landscape one of the most sought after on earth. This is the feeding ground of the new green energy revolution. If the future is electric then the future is here, lying in wait for the world. Our journey will take us to celebrated landscapes like these, the future of which is dictated by worlds beyond their spectacular horizons. From the salt flats we will drift through the Amazon, in search of the lost cities of the forest, and whispered tales of El Dorado, another gold rush long consumed by the trees. We climb to the top of the world, the highest city on the planet; the Bolivian capital of La Paz and we head down to the bed of a long lost sea; the Atacama desert. If the Bolivian salt flats are mirrors to the sky above then the Atacama is a mirror reflecting its possible future, for it is a site that has witnessed by hundreds of years of copper and nitrate mining. We will see this exhausted ground stripped bare and disappearing on the wind. From these dust clouds the Unknown Fields division of speculators, and prospectors will imagine the many futures of Bolivia’s charged ground. A ground of possibility, and potential, on the verge of change – a proving ground in a state of becoming.

Fees- All inclusive Workshop and Expedition fee: £1900. Participants are required to make their own way to meet Unknown Fields at the expedition starting point in Santiago, Chile on July 22nd.

Liam Young, 25 02 15

Brave New Now is a collection of specially commissioned short stories set in a fictional future city developed by speculative architect Liam Young for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Authors have been invited to inhabit the city, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through narrative. It is a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, in which we can imagine the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. Authors include Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling,Tim Maughan, Jonathan Dotse,Rachel Armstrong,Samit Basuand Anil Menon. These speculative fictions are illustrated with a collection of photographs of the present, gathered from a group of photographers who venture out into the world documenting the weak signals and emerging phenomena that have been extrapolated into our imaginary city. In Brave New Now it is not clear what is fact and what is fiction, but rather the two productively intertwine. The two modes of working sit side by side and we slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp.

The future is not something that washes over us like water, it is something we must actively shape and define. Some of the people we meet in the Brave New Now are swept up in what the city could be, others are reserved and look on with caution. It is a place of wonder and of fear. We meet friends and strangers, we hear their stories, and we imagine our own life here. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in the Brave New Now.

“A projective fiction is a critical tool that is both an extraordinary vision of tomorrow and a provocative examination of the pertinent questions facing us today.” Liam Young

This digital publication was commissioned by Close, Closer chief curator Beatrice Galilee, Art Direction by Zak Group and graphic design by Raquel Pinto.
*The support of The British Council has enabled a discounted distribution price of Brave New Now ebook.

Human activity has irreversibly changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and even the Earth’s crust. Humanity has become a geological force. Consequently, the perspective has shifted from humans at the centre of the world to the forces that act on timescales beyond the conceivable. These ideas challenge us to rethink our attachments to the world, and our concepts of nature, culture and ecology. With this book Sonic Acts examines how art and science map and document new insights, and how the changes and transformations that occur on a geological scale can become something humans can feel, touch, and experience.

Liam: Because like I was saying, it is quite extraordinary, like I was talking about the technological sublime. We see it in all these places we go to, we stand at the world’s largest gold mine, it’s a hole in the ground the size of the Grand Canyon, so big it generates its own weather system and planes have to divert around it otherwise they’re sucked into the wind vortex that it creates. We’ve done this…we’ve built the machines that have dug this fucking hole. People travel from all over the world to go and see the Grand Canyon, to go to this fucking hole in the ground. It’s the same kind of thing, it’s actually more impressive because that took millions of years of wind and rain and erosion to create it and we did this in 15 years ‑ that’s pretty amazing. So we used to paint the sublime which was about the fear and order of nature, and now we have the technological sublime where we approach the same kind of landscapes, we have the same kind of feelings about technological and industrial landscapes that we once did looking across the savanna, or looking across the grand canyon, or standing on a peak and seeing the amazon jungle unfolding in front of us. We stand underneath of a crane in a mega-port and we have that same sense of awe and wonder.

Tim: I was standing on the bridge, and the lights on one of them suddenly fired up and it slowly passed over me…a dozen little suns beaming on me, bringing daylight to the night.

Liam: And you get fucking goose bumps, you know what I mean? Like the artificial night when you see a factory on the horizon…it creates this strange kind of synthetic aurora and it’s desolate ‑ it’s utterly seductive. That’s our era’s great art…people used to do the Nazca Lines and we go to the oil pipelines.

Tim: That’s funny you say that because I went to Machu Picchu back in April, and it was fantastic. And then a few weeks later I went to Detroit. And that was fantastic too. And they both seemed strangely similar to me. And I couldn’t quite decide which impressed me more.

With these visions/fictions, Z33 wishes to shift the debate away from what is possible, plausible and probable towards what is preferable: Future Fictions there-fore is essentially a project about ideas and ideals, about dreams beyond hope and fear. Can we learn to critically assess the future visions presented? Which criteria would be valid in doing so? In other words, can we learn to become ‘future literate’? Other artists include Dunne & Raby, Atelier Van Lieshout,Near Future Laboratory and many more. Curated by Karen Verschooren. Photo credit Kristof Vrancken/Z33

Liam Young, 14 07 14

Loop, 60hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra is an immersive live music and drone performance developed through a new collaboration between Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young and musician John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground. John Cale, known for experimenting with different industrial sounds in his practice, once tuned his instruments to the hum of refrigerator motors. Cale in collaboration with Liam Young now explore the soundscape of a new generation, the distant rumble of drone propellers, to be set against the visual spectacle of Young’s choreographed flying machines. Typically associated with militarised applications, each drone is repurposed here as both disembodied instrument and dynamic audio infrastructure. The performance will be stage across two nights in the Barbican Theatre in London. Tickets are selling out fast. You can purchase tickets here.

Liam Young, 29 05 14

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. Each year we navigate a different global supply chain and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. Past journeys have traversed the mines of Madagascar and the Australian outback, the faded nuclear futures of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the black military technologies and conspiracy theorists of the Nevada desert and Burning Man Festival.

This year we travel East to ride the waves of massive container ships and trace the shadows of the world’s desires along supply chains and cargo routes, to explore the dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that global sea trade brings into being. These are the contours of our distributed city, stretched around the earth from the hole in the ground to the high street shelf. Consignments of the precious and industrial, raw and refined, mechanical and alive, drift across infrastructural seas on vast Panamax, Aframax and Suezmax from cavernous factory floors via huge ports like Shanghai, Singapore and Busan and through the bottleneck excavations of Panama and Suez. Our journey to Asia will take us behind the scenes of our modern world, cutting a cross section through the secret lives of products, where intense pockets of activity in wildly unexpected places supply cultures far removed with the fulfilment of their every need and desire. Joining us on our journey will be international collaborators and specialists from the worlds of design, technology, science, art and fiction, and together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in a publication and film.

Eligibility- The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.

Fees- All inclusive Expedition fee: £1600, which includes flights from London, all internal transport, accommodation, entrance fees, meetings, consultants, workshops and all other group costs (excludes meals). Please note: If you are based in Asia you can meet Unknown Fields on location and we can arrange a reduced fee that excludes return flights from London.

+ £60 Architectural Association Membership. If you are already a member of the AA, this is not required.

Liam Young, 10 02 14

At EYEO’s 2013 festival in Minneapolis Liam Young gave one of the closing kenote lectures. In a multimedia performance he takes the audience on a storytelling walking tour through the Brave New Now, an imaginary city, extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. A place found somewhere between the real and the imagined, both achingly familiar and exceedingly strange, stitched together from fragments of distant landscapes and speculative designed fictions.

Liam Young, 21 05 13

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young’s co run studio the Unknown Fields Division is launching the call for applications for their 2013 summer expedition to Madagascar. The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. Each year they navigate a different trajectory as we seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

In times past an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. These were outlaws moored on a marooned ecosystem. Set adrift 88 million years ago, the island is a castaway in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a band of ecological stowaways. In this splendid isolation it has evolved into an unparalleled wonderland of the weird and unique, diverse and unbelievable.

A political coup in 2009 left the country adrift once more – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet’s most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island’s fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem. Rare tortoises leave in rucksacks, forests are carved into the ebony fingerboards on Gibson Guitars or $1million rosewood beds sold in China.

In the run up to the country’s first election since the coup Unknown Fields heads to Madagascar to catalogue the push and pull of economy and ecology and to trace the shadows of the world’s desires across the landscapes of this treasured island. Along our way we seek to uncover some of the complex value negotiations that play out across this unique island and craft new stories from statistics, data, predictions, projections, measurements and offsets.

The Division will venture through wild west sapphire towns and mining landscapes and trek through rainforests ringing with the song of the Indri in search of rare and undiscovered treasures, a menagerie of preciousness and scarcity, of rubies, minerals and exotic spices, of ring tailed Lemurs, ‘octopus’ trees, and carnivorous plants; of pigmy chameleons, tomato frogs and moon moths. We will travel by plane and pirogue, train and taxi-brousse, from rough roads to rough seas, to fishing villages and up rivers silted with eroded soils. Unknown Fields will reimagine a territory that is equally wondrous and scarred as we follow the trail of global resource extraction into the heart of the most unique ecosystem on the planet.

Joining them on tour will be international collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction, and together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in a publication and film developed en route.

Eligibility

The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.

Applications

The deadline for applications is 14 June 2013. Application forms and additional information are available online at: www.aaschool.ac.uk/unknownfields and applications can be submitted to: visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk or contact info@unknownfieldsdivision.com for questions. All participants travelling from abroad are responsible for securing any visa required. After payment of fees, the AA can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop.

All inclusive Expedition fee: £1500, which includes flights from London, all internal transport, accommodation, entrance fees, meetings, consultants, workshops and all other group costs (excludes meals). Please note: If you are based closer to Madagascar you can meet Unknown Fields on location in Antananarivo and we can arrange a reduced fee that excludes return flights from London.

+ £60 Architectural Association Membership. If you are already a member of the AA, this is not required.

Liam Young, 17 04 13

For VOLUME issue 35 Everything Under Control: Building with Biology scientist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford sat down with speculative architect LiamYoung in the basement recording studio of the journal Nature to discuss the mythical beasts of synthetic biology. Rutherford recently worked with the BBC on a series called ‘The Gene Code’ which explored the consequences of decoding the human genome. Recognizing the potential externalities of communicating science poorly, Rutherford works at conveying the misunderstood field of synthetic biology to a broader audience. Download the pdf here or read the pages below. (more…)

Liam has also been interviewed in Vienna by SpaceCuriosities’ Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger and Verena Holzgethan for Orange FM and the Cultural Broadcasting Archive. They discuss the value of the speculative project and the necessity for new forms of architectural culture to engage with the complexity of an anthropocentric world. Listen to the podcast here.

Liam Young, 03 02 13

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young is one of the curators of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Liam is developing the exhibition Future Perfect , a fictional future city that will open for visitors in September 2013. Future Perfect zooms into the fictional city developed for Under Tomorrow’s Sky and develops fragments of the future city at a 1:1 scale.

In a time of crisis architects need to be exploring big visions and bold gestures. It is not the time to retreat. The future must become a project again. Future Perfect brings together an ensemble of scientists, technologists, futurists, science fiction authors and designers to collectively develop the props, spaces, machines, cultures and narratives of their own brave new future city – an imaginary urbanism, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.

Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post oil Dubai, Future Perfect is imagined as a new terraformed urban island. It is a city that is grown rather than built, a computed territory, faceted and abstracted, endlessly reprinting itself as demand requires. Buildings tessellate down the landscape as an inhabited geology of crevice rooms, and public valleys. Its material fabric has evolved as a complex endemic ecology where nature and technology intertwine and where biology becomes an economy. The city has developed in a near future heavily influenced by the imminent boom of the Indian subcontinent, an emerging technology and economic superpower- a hybrid culture, part Bollywood call center, part European cultural capital. It is an imaginary landscape extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research.

In future Perfect project collaborations are forged between designers and technologists to develop a collection of commissioned works that can be inhabited as large scale fragments of the future city. Inhabit these moments of the from the future, sit within its pharmaceutical gardens, listen to the drone infrastructures drifting in the skies above, watch as the city endlessly remakes itself. These strategies bring the architect closer to the technologies that are increasingly shaping the urban realm and the public closer to the scientific research that is changing their world. The Future Perfect think tank includes Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Dociu, Paul Duffield, ARC magazine, Centre For Science and Imagination, BLDGBLOG and many more. Artists and designers for Future Perfect will be announced shortly.

Darryl Chen, 20 10 12

Darryl Chen’s Mobile Mountain [MBL.MTN] project and essay “On Infrastructure” have been published in Architectural Inventions: Visionary Drawings. The Laurence King publication presents a arresting and awe-inspiring visual study of impossible or speculative structures. Highlighting visions that exist outside of established channels of production and conventions of design, Architectural Inventions showcases a multiplicity in concept and vision, fantasy and innovation. (more…)

Liam Young, 17 10 12

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Archis + Volume, Liam Young and the Unknown Fields Division have co authored VOLUME 31: Guilty Landscapes. VOLUME joined Unknown Fields on ther Summer 2011 expedition form the chernobyl Exclusion Zone to Baikonur Cosmodrome and this research, developed alongside Unknown Fields previous missions to dislocated hinterlands around the world have informed the issues theme. Guilt has been effectively used to control and manipulate the masses. But it can also be the start of a change for the better: awareness, concern, action. Engagement and guilt are never far apart. Engagement is sublimated guilt. We can build on guilt, but can we build with guilt? Is guilt a material to design with? You can see the table of contents or check out a sneak preview of the issue.

In three sections: revelations, confessions, and atonement, the issue presents a global scan of large-scale guilty landscapes and our design relation to them. A major section is dedicated to the Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’ as a post nuclear disaster area, with other contributions focusing on landscapes transformed by mining industries, waste, human atrocities and more, as well as ways to atone for these criminal acts.

Liam Young, 06 10 12

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio run by Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Kate Davies. The studio ventures out on biannual expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains, and obsolete ecologies. Far from the metropolis lie the dislocated hinterlands that support the mechanizations of urban life. A city like London is thoroughly embedded in a global network of landscapes and infrastructures that are typically forgotten, unseen, ignored or only presented through particular media narratives. Each year we navigate a different global cross section and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. For Unknown Fields the journey is really about seeing our familiar world differently; we explore these alternative worlds as a means to understand our own in new ways, either through physical expeditions or the design of speculative future projects.

This year as the world of new agers, mystics and psychonauts pilgrimage south, Unknown Fields journeys with them to Central America to ponder the rise and fall of cities, civilizations, and empires, both ancient and modern, and to investigate the cultural and technological infrastructures that underpin them – a network of complex systems that have proved critical to their prosperity and ultimately often implicated in their collapse.

Empires rise and fall and the infrastructural traces they leave behind are evidence of their greatest dreams and their deepest fears. They are the remains of a speculative future, the skeletal frames of world building dreams, the ruled lines on a page soon to be filled with the goings on of a day soon to come. In this time of crisis the future is becoming a project again. As the Mayan long count calendar begins a new phase we will imagine what comes next.

Unknown Fields is a nomadic studio that throws open the doors of the AA and sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

This year the Division will be heading off on a reconnaissance road trip to chronicle a series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States. From the ‘illegal aliens’ of the New Mexico border towns we will head north exploring territories of negotiation and conflict, zones of transgression, suspicion and speculation. We will rumble along the UFO highway, past the mythic territories of Area 51, listening to tall tales from conspiracy theorists amidst the sonic booms crackling in the quiet desert air.

We will visit covert military test sites and the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry as we shape our own experimental craft to launch in the skies above the psychedelic community of the Burning Man Festival, where our journey ends. By the bonfires we will examine the mysteries and conspiracies that surround what lies off the map, off-grid and below the radar as we propose new truths and expose alternative fictions.

Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction including Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG], Nicola Twilley [Edible Geography], futurist Stuart Candy and UFOologist, folklorist and author Mark Pilkington. Together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in an annual publication and travelling exhibition. Throughout our journey the Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention as we examine the unknown fields between truth and fiction.

Liam Young, 25 11 11

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today’s Liam Young has been announced as the first recipient of San Francisco’s Headlands Art Centres ‘ new Architecture/Environment Artist in Residence award, supported in part by Seed Fund. Set in a refurbished Military base the residency focuses around ideas of the larger environment, sustainability, urban planning, architecture, land use and public space.

Liam’s residency will begin with a series of sorties through the surrounding landscape to survey the ecology and obsolete military technologies of the Marin Headlands. Large scale maps and drawings will form the basis for a series of small robotic installations and architectural prosthetics which will be installed on site as a new species of dynamic inhabitants, responding to the fluctuations and deviations of the surrounding landscape. Existing somewhere between biology and technology these delicate devices will imagine alternate strategies for intervening within natural systems. The residency will conclude with a series choreographed aerial robotic drone performances titled ‘Birds of Prey’ launched from the abandoned Nike missile silo sites. The residency will conclude in June with an intensive interdisciplinary design workshop and curated storytelling event in the surrounding woods.

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales.

For the first time, Wonder Stories will be simultaneously hosted in London and New York and Popular Science will join the Architectural Association and Studio X NYC in coordinating the event this year. Join us for the third event in the series as we chart a course from science fiction to science fact with talks, a hands on taxidermy workshop, animatronic guests, swarm robotics demonstrations, datascapes walking tour and live movie soundscapes.

Liam Young, 13 09 11

Liam Young is part of the Glitch Fiction exhibition for the inaugural Paris Design week. The exhibition is open daily from 11:00 – 19:00 12 – 18th Sept at Cite de la Mode et du Design, Docks en Seine, Qai de Austerlitz, Pars 13. If you can’t make it to Paris then you can download the Glitch-Fiction Newspaper to see a summary of the projects.

“Glitch Fiction is the false error, the point of chute, the wormhole in the timeline, the what could have been? At the edge between science fiction and reality, a series of thought-provoking, participative and speculative design projects will be revealed.

From 12th to 18th September, Glitch Fiction will land in Paris for the very first Paris Design Week. Visit us at la Cité de la Mode et du Design to witness a chaotic Black Swan unfold, to feel the spitting heat of ash hit your high-heels in your living room, to have a machine generate your fairytales, to get caught in a thunderstorm of fish, to see your eyes, lips and skin lost in the fragments of others, to explore a new techno-social landscape through your ears or to imagine scientific rituals not yet explored.

Come, test out and experience the fringe of design for yourself. Glitch Fiction mixes activist and experimental designs in a real office of wonders. Dreams, nightmares, near realities and hyper fantasies meet in the middle to explore the implications of current and emerging technologies through the presentation of fictional scenarios, parallel worlds, extrapolated tangents, cautionary tales and design fictions. Inspired by science and technology the following proposals use design as a medium to speculate, be critical and stimulate debate around our human relationship to science and technology in our current, alternative and imagined future everyday lives.

Darryl Chen, 26 06 11

“Our narrative is modernity, and our dystopias are the super-planned, re-planned and unplanned environments of the modern world. The aberrations and abandoned spaces of our modern environments, the margins that are squeezed by the excesses of development, the new natures that are produced in lieu of what was natural, the waste that is left behind after the flight of capital— these are the instable interstices of modern life. They are latent territories that are both the unforeseen consequences of our modern impulse, as well as the raw material for a renewed project on the city. (more…)

THE UNKNOWN FIELDS DIVISION is a nomadic studio that sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. We are both visionaries and reporters as the sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, we will pack our Geiger counters and space Suits as we chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. BBeginning in the shadows of nuclear disaster we will survey the irradiated wilderness and bear witness to a sobering apocalyptic vision. We will skirt the retreating tide of the Aral Sea and mine the ‘black gold’ in the Caspian oilfields and caviar factories. We will wander through the cotton fields of Kazakhstan and tread the ancient silk road before reaching the shores of the cosmic ocean bathed in the white light of satellites blasting into tomorrow’s sky. In these shifting fields of nature and artifice we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and document a cross-section through a haunting landscape of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete.

Together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions, and impromptu tutorials. Across our journey The Unknown Fields Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention that will be chronicled in an annual publication and travelling exhibition. It is a unique opportunity to be a part of an extraordinary research project that will examine the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

The workshop is open to anyone from anywhere. No pre requisites are necessary.

Applications

The deadline for applications is 01 June 2011. Application forms and additional information are available online here and more information can be found at:www.unknownfieldsdivision.com. All participants are responsible for securing any visas required for entry to Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan and are advised to contact their home embassy early. After payment of fees, the AA School can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop. Applicants are advised to contact the AA as soon as possible in order to apply and confirm a place, as space is limited. Places can only be reserved upon receipt of a completed application form and full fees, sent to Sandra Sanna, Administrative Coordinator of the AA Visiting School at visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

Schedule & Venue

The school runs from 11 to 22 July and will begin at our London rally point before travelling by land, sea and air on a landscape cross section from the Chernobyl Exclusion zone in the Ukraine to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazaksthan. This is an immersive, travelling studio with a fixed itinerary requiring full-time participation. Workshops will be conducted en route at a series of unique venues conducted by an ensemble of collaborators who will be joining us on the expedition.

Accommodation & Costs

The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £650 per participant which includes a £50 Visiting Student Membership, made payable to the AA School of Architecture. As a unique travelling studio Unknown Fields has packaged all costs of our extensive travel itinerary including all flights from and returning to London, internal travel from Chernobyl to Baikonur, all accommodation, entrance fees, permits and workshops into one additional fee of £900. Participants need to bring their own laptops, camera equipment and working materials. Please ensure that all equipment you are bringing is covered by insurance. The AA School takes no responsibility for items lost or stolen whilst travelling to/from or attending the workshop.

This year the Unknown Fields Division continues to enter into new relations with the territories of science, nature and fiction. We explore the complex, rich and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures and probe our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world. In our Galapagos Island studio we mused on evolution, last year in the Arctic we contemplated the end of the world and now we look toward strange new beginnings as we embark on a voyage to bear witness to the reinvention of nature through technology in the Australian Never-Never.

The Division will head off on a dust blown road trip across Australia, into the vast and mysterious interior of this remote island continent in search of its ancient tribal hinterlands and its vast techno-landscapes. This land of rich resources and sparsely inhabited expanses houses huge feats of engineering; technological incisions into the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime – the creation mythology of the indigenous Aboriginals. Stories and ceremonies of dreaming beings that once shaped the sacred sites of mountain ranges and river-beds are now spun with the ghosts of modern technologies.

Here beneath the Southern Cross, telescopes listen to the beep-beep from alien worlds, solar arrays track the sun, observatories scan the Milky Way and all the while, machines harvest the earth for the precious ingredients of our daily lives. We will venture ‘out back’ into a hidden terrain – a strange landscape behind the scenes of modern living – visiting the vast mines of the interior, stalking mechanical beasts the size of buildings and exploring excavations the size of cities. Violent gestures of accelerated geology employed across these vast expanses create landscapes of erasure, excavation and re-articulation. Towering mountains of tailings, articulated valleys and vast lakes emerge from these incisions; re-made as new nature. We will be both visionaries and reporters, critically engaged with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Clambering over the wreckage of the future, our architecture will operate in the no-man’s land between the cultivated and the natural: a new Dreaming for a new kind of wilderness.

Liam Young, 29 06 10

From the 9-17 July Liam Young will be coordinating a design studio for the Architectural Association visiting summer school in Madrid with Ricardo de Ostos principal of Naja & de Ostos and Tobias Klien of Horhizon. Shadowy forces have conspired to put together this axis of evil teaching lineup drawn from the most twisted and kinky studios the AA has to offer. It will be a rock n roll 10 day intensive design studio including lectures, workshops and prototyping. Places are still available and you can sign up here.

The studio theme will be ‘Bleaching Green’ which will explore the relation between architecture and energy use in dense cities in the near future. The Bleaching Green workshop will venture into uncharted territories blending design intuition and technological invention. By casting a critical eye on current sustainability and environmental strategies, the course objective is to investigate architecture as a hybrid of artificial and natural systems.

Darryl Chen, 03 04 10

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today is part of Superfront gallery’s group show “Unplanned”. If you can’t make it to LA, the catalogue can be ordered online, which also features essays by Geoff Manaugh (BldgBlog), David Turnbull (GSAPP), MitchMcEwen (Superfront), Ines Moreira (Petit Cabanon) and Cristina Goberna Pesudo (Fake Industries Architectural Agonism). Writes Pesudo: “…it is in the lack of consensus where this exhibition succeeds the most, where perverse imaginaries create a field for disensus apart from institutionalized points of view…” (more…)

Liam Young, 06 03 10

I am pleased to announced that Wen Ying Teh and her project from the Menagerie studio at the AA ‘Necessary Monsters’ run by Liam Young and Kate Davies has been awarded the RIBA 2009 Bronze Medal. The studio have trawled the wilds of genetic modification, augmented bodies and neo biological invention to query today’s idealistic and preservationist views of the natural world. For three weeks we voyaged south, following Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands and South America. We discovered a precious and fragile wilderness teetering at the point of collapse, an ecology in crisis, bearing the scars of a ravenous tourist economy. Projects were developed in this context as critical tools to instigate debate and raise questions about architectural practice in relation to the social and political consequences of various environmental and technological futures. Read below for an exert of the project or explore it in full on the RIBA website. (more…)